Intellectual property loss affects 21 percent of manufacturing businesses in the past year

In ever more competitive global markets the success or failure of a business can rest on insights and solutions that allow it to operate more efficiently than its competitors.

If this information falls into the hands of a competitor advantage is lost. Yet the results of a new study by Kaspersky Lab show that one in five manufacturing businesses has suffered a loss of intellectual property in the last 12 months.

The main cause of this is malware, accounting for 23 percent of losses, but other factors including software vulnerabilities, theft of mobile devices and network intrusion were also given as the source of IP leaks.

Manufacturing industry understands the importance of this data. The survey finds that manufacturers ranked "Internal Operational Information" and "Intellectual Property" as the two types of non-financial data they fear losing the most. For businesses as a whole it’s customer and client information followed by financial details that have the highest fear of loss. But interestingly, manufacturers ranked the fear of losing customer and client information the lowest out of all business segments, possibly because manufacturing facilities are less likely to store this data in the first place.

This doesn't mean that financial services and ecommerce companies are immune to cybercrime. 48 percent of ecommerce businesses and 41 percent of financial organizations have reported losing some data to cybercrime in the past year. What's interesting is the pragmatic attitude they adopt to this, 52 percent of financial services businesses say they have a policy of reimbursing customers for cybercrime losses without investigation.

In addition 27 percent of businesses are willing to meet the costs of losses because they believe they'll be outweighed by the cost of protection. This is despite the fact that 82 percent of businesses say they'd stop dealing with a financial organization which suffered a breach.

You can read the full report into online fraud protection which also looks at what protection measures are being deployed, on the Kaspersky website.